Sunday 31 March 2002 05.16 EST
First published on Sunday 31 March 2002 05.16 EST

Beck's Futures ICA, London SW1

Beck's Futures is back - the annual art award sponsored by the art-loving brewers that aims to serve up tomorrow's talent today. The prize is only three years old, but is already established as a defiant alternative to the Turner. Here, by way of celebration, are a few of the reasons.

Beck's is a much bigger award than the Turner, quite literally: £65,000 to be split between 10, rather than four short-listed artists, most of whom have never shown in museums, let alone upscale metropolitan galleries. It is not awarded by a small group of judges - generally gallerists and museum curators - to an equally small group of artists on whom they may have already bestowed professional preferments.

Nor do the Beck's judges, including Marianne Faithfull and Julian Opie this year, choose from the shows they just happen to have seen. They make their selection from a vast list of candidates put forward by more than 100 nominators, many of them fellow artists.

None of the short-listed artists has to have had a show in the previous 12 months. Nor is there any age limit. The oldest artist this year, Tom Wood, is 52; the youngest, Nick Relph, is 21. So the field is wide and free, the potential for conflicts of interest drastically reduced, and the result, thus far, has been both popular and appealingly promiscuous.

So much for the prize itself; what about the show? The first year was good, including work by Roddy Buchanan, Chad McPhail and David Shrigley. Last year was even better, a close race deservedly won by painter Tim Stoner. This year, the line-up includes artists working in all sorts of media: video, painting, collage, photography, architecture models, even clouds of swirling steam. You would have every reason to hope for a good time and I'm therefore sorry to report otherwise. For this year's show, despite occasional moments, is a dispiriting combination of the boring, the magniloquent and the wilfully secondhand.

Repeating, regurgitating, rejigging, rehashing - if there is any kind of aesthetic here it's cannibalistic, chewing over the art of the recently warm past. It's like coming across a group of musicians who still think it novel to re-sample sampling, or a group of novelists who have not yet heard that fiction based on Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is a closed book, done to death in the past.

This is especially true of the short-listed painters - Kirsten Glass, Dan Perfect and Neil Rumming. Rumming has three works in this show, all of them extremely painful to look at. Bikini Brain takes the form of a human skull, surrounded by X-Files lightning and containing the image of an atom bomb going off in extruded dollops of painted neon. Stallion blows up the Ferrari logo of a rearing horse, outlined in Day-Glo pink and yellow. Its innards - a bit of photo-real anatomy, a spine and ribs made of Shopping Channel diamanté - are so badly painted they actually undermine his principled vulgarity. Rumming is right to describe his work as a clash of idioms - rock, pop, advertising, telly - but he shrieks without demonstrating a basic command of any language.

Worse yet are the paintings of Kirsten Glass: cut-and-paste quotations from porn mags and fashion glossies, spliced with a bit of expressionism and gummed together with globules of Evostik and glitter. Glass distresses her models, in the manner of Dazed and Confused, smearing their mascara in streaky mock tears. Vacant in their original context, jarringly disconnected on the canvas, these paintings still speak less of today than of the bombastic Eighties, in particular the rebarbative image-agglomerations of David Salle.

I can see why these two artists are paired together, but the shouting match does neither any favours. And the cacophony is not improved by the nearby presence of a video piece by Hideyuki Sawayanagi: You will be possessed by love in 30 seconds. This countdown of numbers, projected on a Barbie-pink screen, ends with a sudden flashbulb effect in which the word 'love' is seared on the retina. So brightly does the after-image burn that you are blinded by love and incapable of seeing anything else, for the next 15 minutes.

Sawayanagi's other piece is better: a projection of a man in a suit repeatedly thrown to the floor, where he scuttles and skitters like Kafka's clerk-insect. After a couple of seconds, he is sucked back into a tape recorder that plays a soundtrack of brutal popping and feedback. The tyranny of modern technology, perhaps, but also a homage to the violent repetitions of Bruce Nauman whose Carousel, with its taxidermist's models of deer dangling from a revolving metal arm, is directly invoked in the sculptures of Paul Hosking. Hosking goes further, quoting three for the price of one. His taxidermist's models of deer are plastered with porno decals, in the manner of Grayson Perry's pots. They graze a wall-mounted suprematist abstraction - Malevich rephrased in sticky-backed plastic.

What for? Who knows, except perhaps the chance to see what such artistic miscegenation would look like. Enough quotation, you might be thinking, but I'm afraid there is more. Toby Paterson has such a fascination with Lasdun and Lubetkin that he has painted tidy little abstracts of their concrete buildings - unsullied by people or acid rain - directly on the walls. Apart from nostalgia, I'm not sure what this adds to the originals apart from the backhanded compliment of miniaturisation.

As for Nick Relph and Oliver Payne, their film of kids dancing, skateboarding and generally posing about is tuned to the soundtrack of Terry Riley's 1960s classic You're No Good. Both borrow Riley's pioneering techniques of sampling, layering and looping, but their images are badly conceived and edited. Still, you can always close your eyes and revel in Riley's fabulous music.

Which leaves Rachel Lowe's installation of beams projected against the silhouettes of figures dying in Sarajevo (unfortunately not functioning while I was there), David Cotterrell's steam piece, Tom Wood's photographs and Dan Perfect's paintings. Cotterrell's installation is a loving reconstruction of the Lumière brothers' 1895 film of an oncoming train, here projected on a cloud of unfurling steam. It's been done before and wouldn't look out of place as an educational exhibit at the much-lamented Museum of the Moving Image.

Wood's pictures of Liverpool, mostly taken under cover, catch long-gone moments from the Eighties: discos, snogging, monkeying among the sulphur-coloured asters in municipal parks. They thrive in conjunction, but only one stands alone: the image of an old woman, festooned with carrier-bags in some DHSS corridor, struggling to balance the meagre charity of a sandwich and a cup of tea on her lap.

Dan Perfect's paintings are the best in the show, broad bands of rainbow colours, a little bit hippy but with a nod to hard-edge abstraction, on which he floats an array of cartoonish motifs and stylised graphics. The interplay is fascinating, like watching bizarre new fish in a weightless aquarium. Unlike the other artists here, Perfect has evolved an abstract world of his own, not disavowing the risks of originality or imagination. But some of those motifs are oddly familiar: art quoting art again - whatever else?

Three to see

American Sublime, Tate Britain, London SW1The Great Outdoors, from the Catskills to the Rockies, painted floor-to-ceiling by nineteenth-century American masters.

Poussin to Cezanne, Wallace Collection, London W1Manet, Watteau, Boucher and Ingres: French drawings on loan from the Ashmolean Museum.